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Over her dead body
In 1846, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world'. The conjuction of death, art and femininity forms a rich and disturbing strata of Western culture, explored here in fascinating detail by Elisabeth Bronfen. Her examples range from Carmen to Little Nell, from Wuthering Heights to Vertigo, from Snow White to Frankenstein. The text is richly illustrated throughout with thirty-seven paintings and photographs.
Hard Bodies
Shrill, beefy, drilled - hard bodies populate pop culture and science books alike. The essays in this volume trace the flexing muscles of the hard body in various disciplines and spatio-temporal contexts: from the medieval wooer in tights to the soldier in a bombsuit, from sculpted marble bodies to the treacherous images of German Terrormadels, from 19th century self-improvement manuals to 21st century technoporn, from Ballets Russes to Charlie's Angels, from Afro-Brazilian male sleeping beauties to the black female war machine. (Series: American Studies in Austria - Vol. 11)
The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating
Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death.In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine.It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.
The Uncanny
This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's essay of 1919, "The uncanny," where he was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. As a concept and a feeling, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Nicholas Royle offers a detailed historical ...
The Naked Truth
"In the popular imagination, turn-of-the-century Vienna is a cerebral place, marked by Freud, the discovery of the unconscious, and the advent of high modernist culture. But as historian Alys George argues, this stereotype of Viennese Modernism as essentially "heady" overlooks a rich cultural history of the body in the period. Spanning 1870 to 1930, The Naked Truth is an interdisciplinary tour de force that recasts the visual, literary, and performative cultures of the era and offers an alternative genealogy of this fascinating moment in the history of the West. Starting with the Second Vienna Medical School and its innovations in anatomy and pathology, George traces an emerging culture of b...
Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies
Technologies shape who we are, how we organize our societies and how we relate to nature. For example, social media challenges democracy; artificial intelligence raises the question of what is unique to humans; and the possibility to create artificial wombs may affect notions of motherhood and birth. Some have suggested that we address global warming by engineering the climate, but how does this impact our responsibility to future generations and our relation to nature? This book shows how technologies can be socially and conceptually disruptive and investigates how to come to terms with this disruptive potential. Four technologies are studied: social media, social robots, climate engineering and artificial wombs. The authors highlight the disruptive potential of these technologies, and the new questions this raises. The book also discusses responses to conceptual disruption, like conceptual engineering, the deliberate revision of concepts.
Preserving Dance Across Time and Space
Dance is the art least susceptible to preservation since its embodied, kinaesthetic nature has proven difficult to capture in notation and even in still or moving images. However, frameworks have been established and guidance made available for keeping dances, performances, and choreographers’ legacies alive so that the dancers of today and tomorrow can experience and learn from the dances and dancers of the past. In this volume, a range of voices address the issue of dance preservation through memory, artistic choice, interpretation, imagery and notation, as well as looking at relevant archives, legal structures, documentation and artefacts. The intertwining of dance preservation and creativity is a core theme discussed throughout this text, pointing to the essential continuity of dance history and dance innovation. The demands of preservation stretch across time, geographies, institutions and interpersonal connections, and this book focuses on the fascinating web that supports the fragile yet urgent effort to sustain our dancing heritage. The articles in this book were originally published in the journal Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts.
